Updated Thursday, Dec. 29 at 3:06 p.m.
Southwest Airlines has released a statementsaying it will return to normal operations tomorrow after an eight-day meltdown.
The company also says a page has been set upwhere customers can submit refund and reimbursement requests.
The story from Wednesday:
When Karen Caprioli’s flight to San Diego was canceled on Christmas Eve, the number Southwest Airlines gave her to get another flight kept her on hold past midnight and kept hanging up on her. So instead of staying on hold, she went to the airport.
If she hadn’t gone, Caprioli wouldn’t have gotten a flight to Los Angeles, where she rented a car and drove down to San Diego. She was still able to surprise her grandchildren on Christmas Day, but it was about seven hours later than she had planned.
And between a layover, driving and waiting in lines with other distraught travelers, Caprioli spent virtually all of Christmas Day traveling.
“The people that were crying because they couldn’t get home for Christmas — some of them had kids with them — it was so heart-wrenching,” said Caprioli, who lives in Tulsa. She said she's concerned her Jan. 2 return flight will be canceled — Wednesday was the third day of canceled Southwest flights out of San Diego, she said.
Caprioli is one of thousands of Southwest Airlines customers whose holiday travel plans have fallen into a tailspin. The commercial airline canceled 60% of flights Monday and 70% of flights Tuesday, attributing the cancellations to winter weather before the holiday weekend and the ensuing network failure.
On Wednesday, Southwest had canceled more than 2,500 flights. That’s 2,423 more canceled flights than the next-highest number from any other airline, according to the website FlightAware.
“Southwest is unable to locate where their own crews are, let alone passengers, let alone baggage,” United States Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN. He told reporters Wednesday that Southwest’s problem is past the point of a weather issue.
On Tuesday, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan explained that the airline schedules its flights around communities, not hubs — airports that operate as flagship locations for airlines and the planes they fly. He said flights simultaneously froze as severe winter weather struck the U.S. before the holiday weekend, impacting the company’s network.
Darlene Bryan, who flew to Tulsa from Dallas because an aneurysm she had in 2021 makes her dizzy on the freeway, saw the network meltdown at baggage check when she tried to board her returning flight Monday.
“I was watching them, and they were going, ‘Is your system up yet?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Oh wait, mine’s coming up.’ ‘Nope, just went down,’” she said.
Because she only had one small bag, Bryan passed baggage check and went straight to her flight. But when she tried to board, she discovered her flight had only one crew member and no pilot.
“That happened maybe four times before it finally came up on my phone that it’s been canceled,” she said.
Bryan waited in the airport until she boarded a flight to Dallas through the flight’s standby list. She was the next to the last person on the flight.
On Wednesday, Buttegieg said the Department of Transportation and Southwest will need to put in “an extraordinary level of effort” to make sure the travelers’ needs are met.
